Popular culture is full to the reinventive brim with people forced, through all kinds of coercive circumstance, to remake their lives. Some do it willingly not, many not, but the pattern is always the same – chaos as the old is swept away and the new come crashing in, and Continue Reading
Book review: Bootstrap by Georgina Young
Having your world turned upside down is no easy thing. Even if, like Jackson Sweeney, protagonist of Georgina Young’s novel Bootstrap, seemingly the only gay in the small seen-far-better-days Aussie town of Koornang, your life is hardly worth tweeting out about. Much of the lacklustre pall of Sweeney’s spectacularly unambitious Continue Reading
#ChristmasInJuly festive book review redux: The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus by L. Frank Baum
This post was originally published on 12 December 2018. There are some figures that loom so large in the public consciousness that it’s easy to feel like you know, or you can imagine, pretty much everything about them. Santa Claus is one of those figures. We owe our collective modern Continue Reading
This #ChristmasInJuly, I listened to the festive music of KT Tunstall
Generally speaking, if people hate Christmas music, they really hate it, and the idea of asking them, especially if they’re a musical artist of the standing of Scottish singer-songwriter KT Tunstall, to record any sort of Christmas music is anathema. Burn down the Christmas tree, throw the eggnog down the Continue Reading
A tantalising ton of trailers: Never Have I Ever (S3), Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, Blonde, Oppenheimer, A League of Their Own
Get set to spend your days and nights watching even more movies and shows – as if you aren’t doing that already! Sleep is for the streaming disinclined, right? – because the trailers keep coming, people! In fact, every single one of these five films and shows is worth the Continue Reading
Movie review: Where the Crawdads Sing
Ah, the perils of adapting a much-loved book which had the graceless audacity to become an international bestseller, thus shining the spotlight even more glaringly onto director Olivia Newman and screenwriter Lucy Alibar’s efforts to turn into what was no doubt expected to be a cinematic triumph. It’s bad enough Continue Reading
10 San Diego Comic-Con 2022 reveals I LOVE: Shazam – Fury of the Gods, She-Hulk, Star Trek: Picard S3, Star Trek: Lower Decks S3, I Am Groot, John Wick 4 + more
San Diego Comic-Con is like Christmas for loves of pop culture. While not everything new is announced or premiered there, it pretty much feels that’s exactly what happens, making it the most wonderful time of the year if you crave trailers and clips and panels of the stars and producers Continue Reading
I’ll be there for you between the Alpha and Gamma Quadrants: Star Trek-Deep Space Nine meets Friends in this fun video
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (DS9), which remains my favourite show in a franchise full to the Andorian gills with them, is, for the most part a very serious show. Sure, there’s some silly, fun episodes – think “The Magnificent Ferengi”, “Take Me Out to the Holosuite”, “Badda-Bing, Badda-Bang”, “You Continue Reading
A dystopian or utopian future? Claire G. Coleman’s new novel Enclave imagines both (curated article)
by Maggie Nolan, Associate Professor in Humanities, Australian Catholic University I was reading Noongar author Claire G. Coleman’s third novel, Enclave, a few days after the US Supreme Court overturned the Roe v Wade judgement, a political victory for a conservative project many years in the making. As Michael Bradley Continue Reading
Inspired by an epic true love story: Short film Blush coming soon to Apple TV+
SNAPSHOTWhen a horticulturist-astronaut gets stranded on a dwarf planet, his chances of survival are limited. Knowing that he will not survive this trip, he plants mango trees on the planet when another spaceship crashes on the planet. An ethereal creature named Blush, who has wavy bright pink hair, helps him Continue Reading